This paper examines Valentina Maini's 2020 novel La mischia, which offers a range of elements that help identify an 'unstable reality' as the narrative fabric. Its complex structure reveals continual reconfigurations of the plot and of the relationships between characters, compelling the reader to question the status of the entire narrative, suspended between realism and dream. The term 'realism' can indeed be used productively, but only by considering both the specific scope assigned to the weird within the broader sphere of the fantastical-supernatural, and Mark Fisher's sociological-political use of that category.
The role of passions in the works of Italo Calvino is still largely overlooked. This essay uses narrative semiotics to show that passions are an essential aspect of his writing, as they contribute to shaping his notion of literary realism through different periods, genres, and styles. The analysis focuses on a semiotic reading of the guizzo in Calvino's last novel, Palomar (1983). It is a complex word that expresses a startling perception, a flash of revelation, and a leap of imagination. Drawing from Algirdas J. Greimas with cross-references to Roland Barthes, this essay argues that Calvino's guizzo captures his visual aesthetics as a form of affective realism, which sheds new light on his theory of imagination and fantastic literature.
The article addresses the challenges faced by filone filmmakers to adapt to televisual language and content in the 1980s. Made-for-television horror films exemplify this failed adaptation process in a decade characterized by the rise of commercial television and the consolidation of the dominant market position of Silvio Berlusconi's broadcasting empire. They are also an example of the impact of distribution patterns on discursive practices surrounding the international circulation of Italian horror movies. Challenging ongoing scholarly debates in anglophone contexts, the article aims to shed light on the impact of transnational distribution practices peculiar to production companies like Dania Film and Medusa Distribuzione on the marketization of made-for-television horror series in anglophone countries and beyond. The combination of old and new industrial traditions may not have favoured the series' success in Italy on the verge of the 1990s, but it ensured their circulation around the globe long after.
Despite the popularity of Italian cinema among broader audiences, the extent of its impact on cinemagoers in small countries has not been subject to a close study. This article presents an overview of the reception of Italian cinema in Chile in the 1950s and 1960s, showing some of the transnational connections embedded in its circulation. It focuses on the particularities of Italian cinema reception in Chile, as well as its similarities to other global cases of the period, analysing the way in which film fan magazines and audiences assessed its 'quality' and identity, stars, and film directors. Thus it shows how local and transnational structural conditions of production, distribution, and exhibition were articulated with spectators' own experiences and affective relationship to cinema. The article proposes to rethink the categories in which we analyse Italian cinema and local cinemagoing, unveiling the importance of Italian cinema for Chilean film culture beyond 'popular' and 'art' cinema distinctions.
This essay examines Simona Vinci's ethical commitment in the novelistic diptych Rovina and Strada Provinciale Tre. Built on different narrative modes and techniques (the first being a noir recounted through various points of view and provided with information, at the end of the book, on the environmental situation in Emilia-Romagna; the other being a novel centered on the subject of a road and a woman who inhabits it), these two texts reveal the ever-existing moral possibility of shifting the narrative center from the powerful gaze of a human being to the environment and the damage that the Anthropocene, in its various forms, has produced. The tangible effects of our lack of interest in nature as well as other living beings are palpable in the estranging techniques used by Vinci to narrate the human misery of which 'Strada Provinciale Tre' in Emilia-Romagna, with its suburban degradation, becomes a synecdoche.
This essay explores Stefano D'Arrigo's novel Horcynus Orca (1975), interpreting the nostos of 'Ndrja Cambria to his homeland as a metaphor for hybridization between North and South, nature and history. Drawing from the concept of meridian thought and ecocritical studies applied to the notion of the Global South, this analysis highlights how the novel represents the interaction between the natural environment and the scars of modernity through the metaphor of the sea current, a symbol of cyclicality and contamination. This dialectic between nature and culture is configured in the novel through a series of seemingly opposing poles - pre/post-war, north/south, animal/human, language/dialect - that constantly merge into one another. The use of modern objects in a wild, post-apocalyptic context, and the relationship between the collapse of cultural and natural worlds, symbolized respectively by war and the Orca, reveal the novel's constant tension between modernity and premodernity, analysed not only from the human perspective but also through the landscape and seascape.
This article examines Alessandro Leogrande's positions on the industrialisation and environmental exploitation of Taranto and broadens the picture to his militant production, aspiring to grasp its most significant aspects. Much of the attention in this essay is devoted to writings in which the political perspective is linked to the tradition of critical meridionalism, of which Leogrande represents the last real voice. The aim of this reflection is to show, on a stylistic and political level, the originality of Leogrande's proposal, probably one of the last capable of reactivating the analytical tools of twentieth-century modernity for an interpretation of the social conflict in Southern Italy. The ecologist trait is, in fact, never separated from a more general consideration of historical-material aspects, primarily economic. What emerges is Leogrande's militant posture and his particular physiognomy as an intellectual, in some ways very different from that of the classic meridionalism of the early 20th century, and in others akin to a trajectory that, from Salvemini, arrives via Gramsci up to the 1960s.
This article examines the complex cluster of similar long takes that bookend Ettore Scola's Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (1976). It investigates the role played by the long takes, individually and together, in enhancing the film's grotesque humour and metacinematic commentary. Close analysis of these shots is enriched by an examination of the screenplay, original interviews, and an unpublished collection of illustrations drawn on set by assistant director Marco Pettini. The opening long takes assume the important function of announcing the grotesque register to the audience - something that a planned prologue featuring Pier Paolo Pasolini was to address, though it was never shot because of his murder. I argue that Scola's framing strategy utilizes various stylistic devices of the grotesque (repetition, accumulation, hyperbole, and juxtaposition) and numerous intertextual citations to provoke viewers to reflect more deeply on the cyclical nature of poverty.
